1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to methods, apparatuses, and computer-readable media for monitoring and managing processes such as applications, communication programs, and utility programs, which run on a computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers use processes such as applications, communications programs, and utility programs, to carry out user- and computer-directed tasks. In many computer environments, each process runs independently of others and defines its own rules regarding its initiation, termination and interaction with other processes. Thus, from a general perspective, it is difficult to ascertain the rules governing execution of the processes and their interaction with other processes since the rules are obscured in the code of the processes. It would be desirable to provide a system in which monitoring and control of the processes can be performed externally to the processes, and the rules governing initiation, termination and interaction of processes could be defined externally to the processes. This would greatly simplify control of the processes and enable the rules governing their interaction to be understood by a programmer in a relatively straightforward manner.
Those of skill in this art understand that, for a variety of reasons, a process running on a computer can ‘crash,’ generally meaning that the code fails to operate correctly or otherwise ends unexpectedly. A crash can result from numerous causes, including, for example, the presence of a bug in a process, a process receiving an input state for which it was not programmed to respond, data or code corruption resulting from errors or other causes, a memory or cache overflow, code conflicts, etc. It would be desirable to provide a system with the capability to monitor processes externally to detect any improper operation of the processes. Furthermore, it would be desirable, in the event of a crash, to enable the processes to be readily restored to execution by restart, reboot, or both, automatically without requiring any action on the part of the user. In addition, it would be desirable if the process could be restarted or the device rebooted using a recovery plan configured in advance for such process, providing flexibility in the way that a process recovers from a crash.
Another problem with previous technologies is the manner in which one process controls other processes. In previous approaches, a running process would not have the ability to initiate or terminate another related process in a controlled manner. It would be desirable to be able to initiate a process in such a way as to maintain the ability to terminate from code external to this particular instance at a later time, and to preconfigure its recovery behavior in the event of a crash. In the case of a process requested to terminate, it would further be desirable to provide the capability to perform configurable exit processing prior to the process's termination.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide apparatuses, computer-readable media, and methods for monitoring and managing client processes such as applications, communication programs, and utility programs, which run on a computer, that are capable of overcoming the problems with previous technologies as noted hereinabove.